A state’s own legal-institutional move can be a religious judgment on a faith’s essence
Evidence
As a consequence of Greece having joined the European Union, the Greek state was required by the European charter of human rights to remove any information on religious affiliation, family status, nationality, and thumb print in the identity cards issued to citizens. Popular opposition apparently saw this as a threat to collective religious identity. “We’ve got to fight for our right to be Christian Orthodox Greeks,” one demonstrator put it. … The church, using the language of human rights to defend its authority, has charged that the new arrangement curtails the right of citizens to express their religious af- filiation publicly if they so desire. The government, in its turn, has responded by issuing a judgment about religious belief: “The introduction of new identity cards poses no threat to the Greek Orthodox faith.” This is a religious judgment not in the sense of drawing on Orthodox theology (because it clearly doesn’t do that) but in claiming to identify the essence of that faith. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 675
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: how the modern liberal state quietly usurps theological authority by declaring what does and does not threaten a faith - a secular power grab that presents as neutrality.
- DEEPTHINKING: The anti-clerical case that the government, not the church, ends up defining the essence of Orthodoxy - a genuinely subtle insight about secular power.
- XREF: connects to: Christian churches read religious freedom as a right to proselytise. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 136; Religious liberty bills favor one precise creed over all others — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 646